Hi I'm Philip Newey, author and editor. Here are some thoughts, ideas and other nonsense. I may, at times, express some views that offend some readers. I make no apologies for that. Read on at your own risk. Be sure to also visit my writer's page: http://philipnewey.com. I also run a manuscript services business called All-read-E: http://philipnewey.com/All-read-E.htm

Friday, November 16, 2012

Nothing

Kate Bush, in 2011,
released an album entitled 50 Words for
Snow. The title track features the voice of Stephen Fry contributing 50
increasingly absurd and Fry-ed words for that crystalline variety of H2O.
I have nothing more to say about snow in this post. But as I feel that I have
nothing in particular to say today at all, I was wondering if I could find 10 (an
aim a little more modest than that of Bush and Fry) ways to say it – nothing,
that is.

So here we go:

Vacuum – and no, not the hoovering variety.

Zero – being somewhat mathematically inclined during a previous life.

Zip – not the code (or the fastening device).

Void – bodily functions come to mind, but let’s not go there.

Love – tennis and all that.

Bugger all – Aussies and Brits
will get this (not sure about the North American audience – ok, so sometimes it
means almost nothing, or next to
nothing – cut me a little slack here!).

Sweet FA – choose your own version
of the “FA”.

Nada – alright, so I had to borrow
that from Spanish.

Nihility – for the philosophically
inclined (more like “nothingness” than “nothing”, but let’s not be picky).

Nout – another one for the Brits –
any geordies listening in?

Actually, nothing is very important. You may recall that
line from Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen:
“Nothing really matters.” We can change the emphasis a little: Nothing really matters. It really does. There
is, after all, much more nothing in the universe than something. There is much
more nothing in us than something.
Someone once said that if you compressed the entire human population, removing
all space, the end product would be about the size of a sugar cube. Like all
these claims, this is a very rough approximation (as far as I am aware, no one
has yet tried this experiment – perhaps someone should write a funding proposal);
but it makes the point. Take away all the nothing from inside me and I will
amount to, well, practically nothing.